The Cine-City Brighton Film Festival 2010 ended with a weekend of strong new features – and a golden-oldie – kicking off with Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere; a beautifully shot film, with scenes that linger in the mind.
Elle Fanning delivers a sensitive performance as Cleo, the easygoing daughter of Hollywood actor Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) in the gangly spurts of adolescence. Left in his care when her mother decides she needs some ‘me-time’, the film explores the seedy, lonely side of Johnny’s celebrity life, and Cleo’s gradual influence on his decadent apathy.
Johnny watches with lethargic disinterest as two young blonde women in matching stripper outfits perform a choreographed pole dance to the sound of Foo Fighters’ ‘There Goes my Hero’ trudging out of a portable hifi. The poles screech against their movements in unglamorous discomfort, back-dropped by the dirty white background of the drab hotel room. This coldness drifts through the film in bleached landscapes and vacant interiors as Johnny receives anonymous messages of jilted anger.
Initially incapable of distinguishing boundaries between his vacuous pleasure-seeking and the responsibility he must acknowledge as a parent, his non-committal relationship with Cleo is the narratorial pivot. At figure-skating practice he can barely rip his eyes away from text messaging as Cleo gracefully glides around to the fitting refrain of Gwen Stefani’s ‘I Know We’re Cool’, echoing out of the standard ice rink-quality speakers.
Dull reality is juxtaposed with super-positive, gushing press people who disorientatingly erupt out of nowhere. The tone is laced with understated dry humour, and in an apparent nod to the escapades of the stars, Johnny bumps into Benicio Del Toro in a hotel elevator. Coppola’s film radiates monotony and transience, although perhaps a little too effectively at times, in the sense that after a certain point, many of the beautiful, prolonged shots have the illusive weight of finality.
Here are our other picks from the tailend of this year’s fest.
The Boy Who Turned Yellow
Saturday afternoon saw a rare screening of a selection of direct animation shorts by New Zealand artist Len Lye, followed by Powell and Pressburger’s final collaboration, The Boy Who Turned Yellow; a fantasy adventure electricity lesson, made for the Children’s Film Foundation. Having lost his pregnant pet mouse on a school trip to The Tower of London, John Saunders spends all night worrying and is sent home after falling asleep during an electricity lesson.
On the tube home the entire contents of the train turn yellow, including John and the greater part of Hampstead. Later that night he wakes to a distorted voice calling out “I’m starving, Mr Saunders” (provoking wails from younger audience members) and finds Nick (Robert Eddison – the Holy Grail knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) in his living room. Abbreviated from ‘electronic’, Nick is electricity personified. A strange, yellow middle-aged man attached to a pair of skis, he stands suited and booted in yellow pvc boots, cape, and helmet.
The jolly crackpot turns down John’s offer of a snack, in favour of sticking his hand into a socket and feeding on the ‘delicious’ electricity. Like a scientific ancestor of the boy in Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman, John floats through electricity waves while London sleeps, narrowly escaping a beheading at the hands of the tower’s beefeaters with the help of his classmate, Munro. The sparky little fountain of facts is played by Lem Dobbs, who later in life would work on the screenplay of box office hit Romancing the Stone. Full of some very surreal imagery and logic, The Boy Who Turns Yellow is a colourful, brilliantly silly, very British science lesson.
The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec
By the penultimate evening, the ice, with its giddy hint of Sundance, had completely melted away to a miserable, relentless downpour – but Luc Besson’s archeological romp came swooping to the rescue. With a dash of Jumanji mayhem, the energetic pace fires well-timed wit into The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec.
Set in the early twentieth century, the story is adapted from Jacques Tardi’s 1970s comic of the same name. Former novelist Adèle Blanc-Sec (Louise Bourgoin) is out in Egypt cracking the codes of the pharaohs, while back home in Paris a pterodactyl hatches out of its egg at the natural history museum and terrorizes the city. Adèle desperately hunts for a mummified doctor, in the hope that once revived he will be able to wake her sister, Agathe, out of her cataleptic state. Bursts of narration echo the idiosyncratic gusto of Améliein this lively fantasy adventure.
With the force of Nikitameets Indiana Jones, Adèle is a recognizable Besson female; a stunning action hero. Her fearlessness and single-minded rapid action catapults her from one close call to another, blazing a trail of bumbling men behind her.
Submarine
“I am a prism of light. I am exciting and delicious”, proclaims Paddy Considine, as the mulleted psychic healer Gary Purvis in Richard Ayoade’s brilliant British comedy Submarine. Divided into chapters, Submarine bears traces of Godard’s stylistic awareness, the screen flooding with colour in fade-outs, and nods to other cinematic greats, including the British classic Don’t Look Now.
The story is based on Joe Dunthorne’s prize-winning novel, and follows 15-year-old Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) as he embarks on his first relationship with the resolutely unromantic Jordana Bevan (Yasmin Paige).
Ayoade’s screenplay perceptively picks out those cringey, jokey nuances people drop into everyday speech – which often only serve to highlight the speaker’s self-consciousness – and the portrayal of school is achingly funny and close to the bone. Guilt-ridden by his participation in a bout of bullying, Oliver designs a pamphlet for the victim to advise her how she may avoid further episodes.
Oliver resembles the obsessive, precociousness of Max Fischer in Rushmore, but with a particular British awkwardness. Fearing the passion between his parents has died, he sternly monitors their relationship and launches into an operation to keep his mother away from her first love; the exotic, mystic Gary.
Paddy Considine’s embodiment of smarmy spirituality contrasts with Oliver’s reserved parents, responsibly buttoned up in the dreary creams and greys of stiff 1970s ‘fashion’. The conflicting experiences of tedium and fantasy are brightly emphasized by the cinematography; Oliver and Jordana’s exhilarating pyrotechnic fun together vividly stands out against moody, overcast Cardiff landscapes, and dream sequences unravel in striking locations.
Cine-City Brighton Film Festival 2010 – Round Up: Part III (text) by Sophie Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
